Innocent: 20

Here she dared to say she loved. She wrote the first (what a terrible word!) To a man in the lowest ranks of society.

This circumstance ensured in case of discovery, an eternal disgrace. Which of the women coming to her mother dared take her part? What sentence would be able to repeat them to cushion the blow of the dreadful contempt of shows?

And talking was awful, but write! There are things one does not write, exclaimed Napoleon heard of the surrender of Baylen. And it was Julian who had told her that word! making it as a lesson in advance.

But all this was nothing, Mathilde’s anguish had other causes. Forgetting the horrible effect on society the ineradicable stain of contempt, because she insulted his caste, Mathilde would write to a being of quite another nature than Croisenois, the de Luz, the Caylus.